CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi all,

I was hoping somebody could help me out with some quite strange behaviour I have come across whilst trying to install CiviCRM 1.8.11536 for PHP4 over Drupal 5.2.

I have installed Drupal without any issues that I am aware of. After CiviCRM is enabled as a Drupal module, I receive the following errors:

    * warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: Unable to access /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/files/civicrm/custom/ in /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Utils/File.php on line 118.
    * warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: Unable to access /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/files/civicrm/templates_c/en_US/ in /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Utils/File.php on line 118.
    * warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: Unable to access /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/files/civicrm/templates_c/en_US/ in /nfsn/content/mojotest/public/sites/all/modules/civicrm/CRM/Utils/File.php on line 118.

It appears that CiviCRM is having difficulty mkdir'ing the directories it requires under /files.

/files contains, amongst other things:
drwxrwxrwx  3 me   web   512 Oct 30 14:31 civicrm

/civicrm contains, as recommended by the CiviCRM installation guide (http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Install+CiviCRM+1.8+for+Drupal), the following three directories:
drwxrwxrwx  2 me  web  512 Oct 30 15:08 crm_docs
drwxrwxrwx  2 me  web  512 Oct 30 15:09 templates_c
drwxrwxrwx  2 me  web  512 Oct 30 15:08 upload

As you can see, I've made the group of all these directories web, and I've also chmod'ed them to 777 for good measure.


FYI, mkdir is being called from this function in civicrm/CRM/Utils/File.php:


    /**
     * create a directory given a path name, creates parent directories
     * if needed
     *
     * @param string $path  the path name
     *
     * @return void
     * @access public
     * @static
     */
    function createDir( $path ) {
        if ( is_dir( $path ) || empty( $path ) ) {
            return;
        }

        CRM_Utils_File::createDir( dirname( $path ) );
        mkdir( $path, 0777 );
    }


It appears that CiviCRM is having difficulty making the directories it needs to run. I can confirm this by manually creating under /files/civicrm the directories /custom and /templates_c/en_US -- this removes the errors, but not their underlying cause. A bit of CiviCRM usage brings back the same issue with mkdir.


Thanks for taking the time to read down to here. Any ideas?

Best,
Rahul

Hi lobo,

Thanks for your reply.

My host is nearlyfreespeech.net (NFSN).

1. NFSN use PHP 4.4.7 with safe_mode: http://example.nfshost.com/phpinfo.php. I understand that CiviCRM 1.9 requires PHP 5+, so I can only use 1.8 or earlier. I chose the latest revision of version 1.8.

2. Understandably, NFSN's position on safe_mode is non-negotiable (from their FAQ):

Can PHP safe_mode be turned off for my site?

No. In a shared hosting environment such as we offer, keeping everyone's web site safe and secure is of vital importance. We have carefully constructed an environment where your site and its files can be as secure as possible, and PHP's safe_mode is currently one of the many essential components of that environment. Therefore we apologize, but we cannot allow it to be disabled.

We are looking into ways to make PHP available without safe_mode because a very few popular applications won't work in this environment. However, that effort has not been assigned a completion date.

This question almost always comes up in conjunction with one application, Gallery. Gallery's developers have been less than receptive to the idea that their software should be updated to work with safe_mode, so unless we find a way to work around it, it is unlikely this application will ever work on our system.

If your interest in disabling PHP's safe_mode stems from a desire to run Gallery, we recommended that you consider Coppermine Photo Gallery instead. It offers very similar features, but does not have Gallery's restrictions and works very well on our system.

However, having looked through the trouble other people have had with safe_mode in previous versions of CiviCRM, I thought that these issues had since been found and fixed. Am I mistaken here or is there another reason for the error?

Thanks,
Rahul